Month: January 2012

Not sure what went wrong, we really can’t blame the sound system or anything, I guess it’s because we didn’t prepare well.. We actually sounded really good together during the sound check, to the point where I was rather confident of at least putting up a good show. But.. it just didn’t happen during the actual competition period. We were off-pitch, sharp, our lead went flat at a crucial part, and comments from our friends indicated that we were not in tune for several parts of the song.

I blame myself for not mentally preparing well before I step on stage – my heart was beating fast, and I didn’t cool down well enough. Maybe I should’ve stressed myself a little during the waiting time, by constantly practicing my own part. I think I wasn’t concerned in the sense that I thought we wouldn’t make so many mistakes, but we really did, and we did badly.

Lesson learnt – always prepare more than you think you need. I really need to start working harder to perfect my hearing and singing, so that such things will not happen again.

I happened to be one of the unlucky souls who had a lot of trouble jailbreaking.

Tips for a successful jailbreak:

– Do a Shift restore. This means downloading the iOS 5.0.1 firmware for your device (www.redmondpie.com), going to iTunes, hold down Shift and click the Restore button. A file dialog should open, and point it to the ipsw firmware file you downloaded. This does a clean restore back to the original 5.0.1 software, with all your settings removed (make sure to backup!)
(I am guessing I had this problem as I first updated to 5.0.1 from 4.3.5 without erasing data)
(It wasn’t enough to do a Erase all Data and Settings from the iPad for me)

– Make sure your iPad is plugged in through the whole process (or at least until the progress bar reaches completion on the Absinthe GUI program). I used the Windows version, and before the progress bar completes (and say something like ‘Almost done’), do not unplug.

– Instead of pressing the Absinthe icon after the GUI program completes, what I did was to go to Settings – General – Network – VPN and slided the slider ON. After a while (with the spinning wheel), it will say ‘A configuration error occured’. Now wait for a short while and your device will reboot.